Falling Up
by Aurilia
Summary: A horror story in honor of Halloween. Tony gets separated from the team while pursuing a suspect. Can he make it back to them alive?
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer:** This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by the writers, producers, et al of the television show 'NCIS'. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person, internet persona, or other being, living or dead, is completely coincidental and unintentional unless otherwise noted.

**A/N:** This is, in honor of Halloween, a try at honest-to-goodness horror. It's one genre I find myself struggling with, so I figured why not try to fix that problem? Anyway, I hope it manages to scare you. Also, this isn't meant to be set in any particular season, only that Ziva is on the team and Vance is the director, but even so, I don't believe there are any spoilers to worry about.

* * *

**Falling Up**

_Chapter One_

"Federal agents!" Tony shouted, aiming his gun at the cluster of men surrounding a couple of crates marked 'Property of US Navy' and a metallic briefcase containing stacks of cash. Off to his right, Ziva mimicked his stance, while on the other side of the smallish warehouse, McGee and Gibbs did likewise. "Don't move," he commanded, walking closer to the group.

The four men raised their hands, exchanging uneasy glances among themselves. _Looks like this one's going to be easy,_ Tony thought while the team finished crossing the distance to the group. _We got all of them, too. Fredricks, Umpton, Calloway, and Knippenhoff._ Gibbs and McGee reached them slightly ahead of Ziva and Tony, but only a step or two ahead. The four agents, seemingly without communicating anything out loud, each selected one of the would-be arms dealers and began reading them their Article 32s – or, in Ziva's case, Fredricks' Miranda Rights – while patting them down and latching handcuffs into place.

Tony just finished searching Calloway when an elbow landed sharply in his ribs and Calloway sprinted towards a door that lead into an office area for the warehouse. "Damn it," Tony grumbled, then took off after him. _Why do I always wind up with the runners?_

"Ziva," Gibbs' order was implicit in his tone – _Go after them_.

Tony heard it, but spared no thought on it while ducking through the door. He registered the sound of his partner's footsteps behind his own, even while seeing their suspect duck through a steel fire-door. He slammed into it, only a few feet behind Calloway. The door opened into a cement stairwell, leading down. Tony caught a glimpse of Calloway as the man leapt the last few stairs and disappeared into the gloom of the basement. Tony put on a fresh burst of speed, and followed suit.

"Give it up, Calloway!" he shouted into the shadows. "There's nowhere to go!" The blueprints McGee had located had shown as much when Tony had studied them earlier that afternoon.

"That's what you think!" Calloway shouted back, his words containing a bite of humor and glee.

The sound of Calloway's footsteps halted, and Tony squinted into the darkness, trying to find out where the man was. His right hand found his gun with minimal input from his brain, while his left checked pockets to see if he had a flashlight on him. "Come on, kid! I saw the plans for this place. There aren't any exits from this level. It's only a matter of time before we find you and bring you in with your buddies."

Calloway laughed, the sound coming from directly ahead of Tony. Faintly, Tony could hear Ziva checking the row of tiny offices above. Slowly, Tony crept forward. "You don't know everything," Calloway said. A grating, mechanical series of slightly muffled _thunks_ and _clanks_ rendered further conversation impractical. After only a couple of moments of this racket, the shriek of rusty hinges pierced the darkness, overlaid by the grinding, grating noise of metal on concrete. Calloway let out a small chuckle and Tony was positive he heard the ensign mutter, 'Thanks, Granddad,' before beginning to run again.

Tony growled under his breath and ran towards the sound of the footsteps, silently praying that he wouldn't trip on anything. After three steps, his questing left hand finally found a familiar small cylinder. At seven steps, the flashlight was out and clicked 'on'. It didn't throw a lot of light, but it was enough to keep Tony from bouncing off the irregularly-shaped frame of the doorway through which Calloway had disappeared. Just as Tony ducked through it, the same metallic _thunking_ and _clanking_ started up again.

He ignored it, and continued sprinting after Calloway, though some part of his brain noticed that it was the sound of the door to the secret passage closing behind him. The tunnel was brick-lined, and only about five feet wide, with a narrow arching roof. It continued straight for a little over three hundred feet before twisting off to the right. Calloway was far enough ahead of Tony that he couldn't see him in the somewhat weak beam from his flashlight, but the man's footsteps echoed back to him.

Tony reached the sharp bend in the tunnel and skidded to a halt. He could no longer hear Calloway's footsteps, only his own. "Calloway!" he called out. There was no response. _What were you expecting? For him to step out and say, 'Here I am, so sorry to have run away like that'?_ He nearly rolled his eyes at his own silliness. Instead, he carefully crept up to the corner and crouched. He aimed the flashlight down the new length of tunnel and peered around the brick. Calloway was nowhere to be seen, but the tunnel curved again to the left only twenty feet ahead.

Tony slipped up to the new bend and repeated his actions. The next segment of tunnel went on for about a hundred feet, but contained a T-intersection at the end and a branch at its midpoint that opened off to the right. _Fantastic. Which way did he go?_ Tony closed his eyes and focused all his attention on his hearing, but that lent him no clues. He sighed and opened his eyes, then crept to the first branch in the tunnel. It didn't lead to another tunnel, but opened instead onto a room half-filled with slowly-disintegrating wooden crates. One crate stood open, near the archway back to the tunnel. Tony paused long enough to ascertain the bottles it contained were gin. A tiny part of Tony clapped his hands and jumped up and down in excitement that he was inside a prohibition-era secret passage, but most of him was focused on finding Calloway. _Who definitely isn't in here_. Tony exited the room and continued towards the T-intersection.

At the intersection, Tony aimed his light to the right, then the left. _Which way?_ He strained his ears, but could hear only himself. Both directions were identical, going on for about thirty feet with additional archways on either side every ten feet or so, before dead-ending. _Eenie, meenie, miney, moe_. Tony went to the left, pausing at the first arch find another tunnel, peppered with archways. The next doorway revealed another room of crates like the first. A rustling noise came from the corner furthest from the door. Carefully, Tony silently maneuvered around the boxes and aimed both his pistol and the flashlight at the source of the noise, his pulse hammering in his ears.

He stepped around a precarious stack of crates and nearly jumped out of his skin when he spotted a pair of beady black eyes staring back at him. The rat _squeaked_ and scuttled into the crack between the crates and the brick wall. Tony had to laugh a little. "Damn rats," he muttered, then let out a long breath. _Think it's time to head back to the team. We're going to need more people on this one._

Tony exited the storage room and started back to the passageway that would take him back to the warehouse basement. He didn't hear the nearly-silent rush of footsteps behind him, but he did sense something off. He started to turn, but something large and heavy connected with his skull.

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**A/N2:** I hope I've captured your attention. More to come soon!

Please remember to review. Thanks in advance.


	2. Chapter 2

**Disclaimer:** This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by the writers, producers, et al of the television show 'NCIS'. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person, internet persona, or other being, living or dead, is completely coincidental and unintentional unless otherwise noted.

**A/N:** Not a lot happens in this chapter, but I'm not going to apologize for it. Everything will eventually make sense. I promise.

* * *

**Falling Up**

_Chapter Two_

Slowly, Tony peeled his eyes open. He was met with blackness so complete he had to reach up to confirm that, yes, his eyes really _were_ open. His pulse thudded between his temples, sending small shrieks of pain through his head, but it wasn't too bad. _I've had worse._ Sitting up, Tony blindly felt around for his flashlight and gun. The second was relatively easy to locate – it was only a few inches from him – but the first…

"Phone, stupid," Tony muttered and lightly headslapped himself. He retrieved his cell from his pocket and hit a button. The sudden flood of light sent a stab of intense pain through his brain, but it was transitory. Once his eyes adjusted to the light, Tony spotted his flashlight, nestled against the far wall of the brick corridor. He stooped and scooped the knockoff, rubberized Maglite off the floor, then turned his attention to the cell itself.

"No service. Why am I not surprised?" He sighed and moved the phone back to his pocket. Clicking the button on the butt of the flashlight rewarded him with its familiar yellow glow. "At least _something's_ going right," he grumbled. _Must've landed square on the button and turned itself off._ "Now let's get back to the door and see if the team's managed to figure out how to open the damn thing."

Keeping his ears open for any sign of Calloway – _Even though he's probably long-gone by now_ – Tony headed down the tunnel towards the door back to the warehouse. The only sounds that reached him were his own footfalls and the faint _squeak_ and _tickity-tick_ of rats or mice. He reached the shortest segment of tunnel, the twenty-foot section that lead off from the long entrance to the catacombs, only to find a dead end. Where the tunnel should have bent sharply in a ninety-degree twist to the left was a false wall that blended so seamlessly into the rest of the brick surrounding it that even Tony's keener-than-most eyesight was hard-pressed to locate the seams.

Rapping his knuckles against the brick provided two small tidbits of information: One, the false-wall was, for all intents and purposes, _real_, made up of actual brick and mortar. Two, there was no hollow echo, meaning that whoever designed this particular piece of architecture knew what they were doing. "Okay… Lemme see here," Tony whispered, then moved the flashlight so he was holding it with his mouth. Using all the strength he could muster up, he first tried pushing the wall. It didn't move, so he adjusted his stance and tried to slide it like a cheap closet door, first to the left, then to the right. This was met with the same results. _Maybe like a garage door?_ He crouched and wedged his fingertips into a mortared seam, then attempted to pull upwards.

All he succeeded in doing was ripping the fingernail off of his left middle finger. A flood of white-hot agony flashed through him and the flashlight tumbled to the floor as he let out a strangled whimper. Gingerly, he wrapped the bleeding digit in his handkerchief. "Damn it," he hissed around the flashlight as the high-quality cotton came into contact with the naked nail bed. _Why is it that hurts _more_ than when I've been _shot_?_ Further attempts to open the door would need to be shelved for the time-being.

Tony pulled his injured hand into a loose fist and cradled it protectively against his chest as he returned the flashlight to his other hand and turned around. "There's gotta be some other way out of here…" He headed back to the T-intersection where he'd been knocked unconscious. On the way, he checked the time on his phone and found that he'd been separated from the team for roughly forty minutes or so.

Turning left once more at the T, Tony found that the two unexplored doorways on that branch lead to a room that contained numerous rows of empty wine-racks, and a second room which contained one forgotten wooden crate of peach schnapps. The right-handed branch of the T consisted of five doorways. Two lead to mostly-empty rooms, though one had the remains of a crate with Cyrillic lettering on it, and the second contained a pile of glass shards in one corner. The other three doors, on the left side of the passageway, lead into a room that still smelled faintly of rum, a corridor that went on for a little over thirty feet before bending to the left, and a larger room containing a couple of wooden barrels. This last room had definitely once housed beer, as there was no mistaking the smell.

Following the corridor, he found that it didn't just turn left. There was another hallway that went right, but a series of metal bars not unlike those found in a jail blocked access. It contained a gate, but the gate was definitely locked. So, Tony went left. The tunnel twisted to the right once more after only fifteen or twenty feet, and he found himself staring down the opposite end of the hallway he'd first noticed during his abortive chase after Calloway. He started down it, and paused to peer into the rooms which had formed the O-shape of the hallways. The first was empty, save for a pair of empty scotch bottles in the middle of the floor. The second was the same rum-smelling room he'd walked past just a few minutes earlier. Directly across from the rum-room was a door blocked by a pile of wooden crates. The mental map Tony was drawing of this place told him that it was a second entrance to the room wherein he'd spotted the rat.

The final arch of brickwork was on the right-hand side, situated between the bottle-room door and the rum-room door. It was – _gasp, shock_ – another hallway. The two rooms on the right side contained, in order, several crates of bourbon, and a half-dozen barrels sporting the brand for a Canadian whiskey distillery. Bit-by-bit, Tony was piecing together a history of this maze. _It wasn't a speakeasy, at least I don't think it was. I haven't seen anything that could remotely resemble a bar. Not yet, anyway. No, I think this was a local distribution hub. One of the places a DC speakeasy could order their stock during the twenties._ At the end of the tunnel, he was met with another set of bars and gate, only this gate was still standing open.

Beyond the gate, the tunnel continued for nearly eighty feet before angling left. Before that point, Tony could see only two archways, both on the left-hand side. The first revealed a short hallway, one wall shared by the wine-room and the room with the forgotten schnapps, and the other had two doors into a pair of rooms outfitted nearly identically, with waist-high tables, crates of tiny jars no bigger than Tony's thumb, and a set of old-fashioned balance scales. One of Tony's eyebrows crept a little higher than the other as he left the pair of rooms behind and headed for the next archway on the long tunnel. _Huh. Must've been for opium or heroin. Maybe morphine. Cocaine, too, for that matter. Weed wasn't made illegal until '37, so it wouldn't have been for that. Guess if I was already risking prison for the booze, it wouldn't be too much out of the question to move other recreational substances._ The next archway opened onto another room like the last two, with scales and tables and tiny little vials.

After rounding the bend in the tunnel, Tony found that it continued on for only about forty feet before dead-ending. On the left, near the end of the tunnel, was another 'drug room', and on the right, at the midpoint, was an honest-to-goodness _door_, made out of steel. It opened on noisy hinges with little to no effort, and revealed a hallway that actually looked like a hallway – albeit one in a basement. It had a cement floor and ceiling, and the cinderblock walls were painted a greenish-grey. It was also the first time Tony had noticed evidence of overhead lighting; every ten feet or so, an archaic incandescent fixture hung from the ceiling on cobwebby chain.

A door on the right opened into a room which Tony could have identified in his sleep – the distinctive shape of gun-racks hadn't changed appreciably since the invention of the metal cartridge bullet back in 1845, though all the racks were currently empty. "Wonder if the guns were part of what they sold from here, or just a precautionary measure?" he mused aloud. The door on the left opened into an office, paneled in wood, with thick carpet that might once have been green, but was now grayish with dust and age, unraveling in places. A large desk sat at one end, encircled by empty bookshelves, while a pair of armchairs faced it, both leaning precariously towards one another, spilling stuffing and tattered upholstery on the floor.

Beyond the door to the office was another short hallway off to the left, from which a single door opened on the right into a room filled with myriad levers and buttons. None of them were labeled, and Tony promised himself to come back to them in a moment. The main hall terminated in a large open area with a ceiling twice as high as anywhere else in this secret maze of rooms. The center of this open area was dominated by an ancient lift, an antique 1929 Ford pickup with a wooden bed still parked on it, lifted halfway to a rectangular opening in the ceiling. Unfortunately, it was not an opening to the outside world. At some point, a new layer of who-knew-how-thick concrete had been laid where the lift would have opened to street-level. The massive triangular trap-doors which had barred weather and intruders had long since lost the fight with entropy and had fallen to the floor.

_Knew it really couldn't have been that easy,_ Tony thought while returning to the room of levers. Even after spending a good hour looking at them, he still couldn't figure out what most of them were for – though he did manage to determine which had likely operated the lift. Eventually, he gave himself a mental shake and sighed. "Come on, DiNozzo – as fascinating as this place is, I'd rather spend the night in my own bed. Besides, I don't think Domino's delivers here." He abandoned his examination of the machinery and started to head for the door, but his flashlight landed on a small hook set into the doorframe. "Huh… Could it be that easy?" Hanging from the hook was a set of four keys. "Calloway had to have gotten out somehow. Fake brick wall or no fake brick wall, I doubt he headed back towards Gibbs, so that leaves the locked gate. Probably has a copy of the key and locked it behind him." He snaked the keys and hurried back through the door to the brick-arched-tunnels of the main complex.

The gate unlocked with the third key on the ring, needing force enough to turn it that the key itself nearly snapped off in the lock. The corridor on the other side of the gate went straight for a short distance, then turned to the right and stretched on far enough that the feeble glow from Tony's flashlight couldn't penetrate to reveal its end.

The headache he'd been nursing since waking pulsed in time to his footsteps as he made his way down the tunnel and with each step further into this unexplored area, the air seemed to grow heavier, thicker with both moisture and dust. Eventually, an archway presented itself to Tony's right. He swung his light around and found a short stub of a hall, only thirty feet or so, lined on both sides with rusted iron bars. _Now what would this have been used for?_

Curious, he stepped a little closer and examined the first cell on the left. The door to it stood open. His light picked out a cot, bare of padding or blankets – _likely lining some long-dead rats' nest_ – bolted to the brick wall at the back of the cell. Round pock-marks in the brick, a jagged line at roughly the height of a sitting person's chest, sent a rash of gooseflesh down Tony's neck. "Whatever this was used for, I get the idea some really Bad Stuff happened here." A similar scene repeated in the last cell on the right, only in that case, the bullet-holes were concentrated in the corner where the two brick walls for this area met.

Just beyond the cell-lined hallway, another archway opened to reveal more evidence of a long-ago battle. The room was only about fifteen feet square, but its forgotten occupants had constructed a rough barricade in the middle of the room. Wooden tables lay on their sides, decorated with holes. Broken chairs had been used to shore up weak spots. The wall of the hallway just across from the door into the room was pitted with bullet holes and even without entering the room itself, Tony could see the mossy color of aged brass littering the floor.

Continuing on, Tony's flashlight finally picked out the far end of the tunnel as it made another sharp turn to the right. It went for thirty feet before dead-ending, but had two openings on either side. The first on the right revealed a row of old metal bed frames, some still clinging to the last shreds of their mattresses, with a short row of moldering shower fixtures lining the far wall. Across from the four bunk-beds was a line of assorted other furniture: a small table bracketed by rickety-looking chairs, a chest of drawers, a couple of trunks. For the first time, Tony also noticed how this hideaway had been lit back when it was still in use – oil lanterns hung from small hooks embedded in the masonry every few feet. Back in the hall, he noticed there were definitely hooks up near the arched ceiling, but no evidence of any other lanterns. The door on the left, directly across from the room with the bunks, contained a kitchen setup, though the only bits that remained were a hand-pump sink, a massive cast-iron stove set up to burn either wood or coal, and an honest-to-goodness icebox, complete with a barrel-like bin on top of it, where the ice itself would rest.

Of the next pair of doorways, the one on the right opened into a room packed tightly with assorted crates and barrels. A line of tin cans on a shelf next to the door were still in good enough shape that Tony could easily read their labels. _Kerosene. Probably for the lanterns. Wonder if there are any matches around here?_ Almost as though the thought had triggered it, his flashlight beam began to dim drastically.

"Damn it!" Tony quickly clicked it off and returned it to his pocket, then grabbed his cell phone. Using his phone for light and working around his still-throbbing finger, he quickly ascertained that at least a couple of the tin cans still contained liquid. He grabbed one and headed back to the room with the bunks. Carefully, he sat the can on the small table and retrieved a lantern from one of the hooks before easing himself onto a chair. It creaked noisily, but held his weight.

"I get out of this," he muttered, setting his pocket knife and the flashlight on the table, "and I'm going to start carrying matches." He ignored the fact that he already carried a book of matches in his backpack. With his pack resting in the back seat of the team's sedan, it was rather a moot point.

The screen on his phone went dark. Tony let out a small growling noise and hit a button to turn it back on. _Wonder if I can reset the options to leave the backlight on?_ He tinkered with it for several minutes before locating the right menu, then found that the longest the backlight would stay on was sixty seconds. _That'll have to do._

He sat the phone at an angle against the wall and took a moment to clean the dust and cobwebs off the lantern. The lantern itself was rather straightforward, with a small screw-cap to the reservoir, and though it was dry, it still contained a length of wick. It took more effort than he'd anticipated to open the cap to the reservoir, but he managed. _Don't think my finger is ever going to forgive me, though._ He filled the reservoir without spilling too much of the kerosene.

He hit a button on his cell to keep the light on, then turned his attention to the flashlight. He unscrewed the head, where the light bulb was contained, like he was going to change out the batteries, but sat the battery compartment aside. Next, he unscrewed the gasket that held the lens in place. Using his pocket knife, he cut the rubberized plastic housing away from the inner workings, then carefully shattered the plastic that comprised the reflective cup surrounding the bulb. "Here goes nothing," he murmured, moving the remains of the light end of the flashlight to the edge of the table. He rested the bulb directly on the table's surface, then used the handle of his pocketknife and broke the glass.

Barely daring to breathe, he held the remains of the lens area up to the light of his cell's screen and peered closely at it. His luck had held – the filament was undamaged. He reattached it to the battery compartment, then opened the lantern so he could reach the wick. He checked to make sure it'd absorbed enough fuel and found it had. "Please let this work," he whispered, then moved the flashlight with its exposed filament so that it was touching the wick. He clicked the button.

The filament flared to life, glowing more dimly than ever, but still working as it should.

A tiny wisp of smoke drifted up from the wick.

Tony held his breath.

A microscopic flare of light came from the wick, even as his cell went dark.

_Success!_ The miniscule flame caught hold and spread over the exposed wick. Tony removed the remains of the flashlight, noticing as he did so that the flame had burned through the remains of the bulb's filament. He closed the lantern and adjusted the wick so it put out a steady mellow light without smoking. "Definitely need to invest in a LED flashlight, too."

Returning his cell to his pocket, Tony stood and grabbed the lantern. _Come on, where's the back door to this hell-hole?_

The door across from the store-room where Tony'd found the kerosene contained more evidence of a shootout – another makeshift barricade, bullet pockmarks – but more importantly, it contained a staircase. Rusty wrought-iron descended in a tight spiral in the far corner of the room.

Tony grinned. _Knew there had to be more to this place. _Certain it was the same direction Calloway had gone, Tony didn't think twice. He started down the stairs.

He was halfway down when the decaying supports that had held it in place for nearly a century snapped.

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**A/N2:** Before anyone tries to say differently, I know what Tony did with his flashlight will work – I've done it. I don't recommend it, of course, but if you're in a sticky situation, it'll work. You just have to be careful about it (and don't use anything with a flashpoint higher than lamp oil or kerosene – it can cause… problems of the boomy kind).

Please remember to review. Thanks in advance.


	3. Chapter 3

**Disclaimer:** This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by the writers, producers, et al of the television show 'NCIS'. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person, internet persona, or other being, living or dead, is completely coincidental and unintentional unless otherwise noted.

**A/N:** Yes, the chapters for this story are all extremely short. I figured it fit the theme a little better than longer chapters - or even posting this as a one-shot.

* * *

**Falling Up**

_Chapter Three_

The first thwanging _snap_ spurred Tony on to very nearly fall down the remainder of the stairs. Two more _snaps_ of the rusted cable holding the iron in place _thwanged_ out like sci-fi gunshots in quick succession. As his feet hit damp concrete, Tony spun in place and stared back at it, holding the lantern high overhead. An unearthly groan of settling metal echoed throughout the cavernous room in which he now stood with his heart thudding in his throat. _Is it my imagination, or does it seem like that thing is staring at me?_ He took a moment to let his pulse settle back to a more normal rhythm.

Once he felt a little more in control, Tony turned and examined his new location. The pervasive stench of mildew and mold floated on heavily humid air. Light from his lantern revealed a large room, roughly forty or fifty feet to a side, with a cracked concrete floor and walls carved out of the bedrock. Pools of stagnant, greenish water collected in the low spots of the floor, while mounds of rotting fabric created small hummocks and islands. Sheets of cobwebs softened the corners and draped down from the ceiling like Abby's version of party-streamers.

Bolted to the walls at irregular intervals were the rusted remains of candle holders. One near the stairs still possessed the stump of an old candle, though on closer inspection, it lacked a wick. _Might still come in useful, particularly since I don't think the stairs would hold me long enough to go back the way I came._ Tony gingerly transferred the lantern to his injured left hand and reached through the cobwebs and pried it out of the holder.

A glossy black spider the size of a fifty-cent piece landed on the back of his hand. Reacting on instinct, Tony shook his hand and leapt backwards. The spider was flicked off into the darkness, but Tony landed awkwardly, half on one of the mounds of moldy fabric. His ankle turned under him, and made his knee buckle. He managed to catch himself before any weight on either joint could cause a trip to become a sprain or break. The hand holding the candle stub landed in the middle of the pile of fabric. After regaining his balance, Tony shifted some – the pile hadn't been nearly as yielding as it should have. Moving the lantern closer, Tony grasped a mildewed edge of what appeared to have once been a blanket and pulled it open.

The grinning caricature of a moldering skull grinned back at him. "Holy crap," he hissed and again, Tony instinctively jerked back, but the reaction was mitigated by his long experience in dealing with corpses in his day-to-day life. Once the knee-jerk was over, he pulled a little more of the decaying blanket aside and saw that the skeleton was tiny, missing one front tooth, while the other was half-grown. Dark, curly hair clung to the scalp in leathery patches. Clutched against the ribs was the rotted remains of a porcelain doll sporting the same dark and curly hair.

Knowing there was little he could do until he managed to make it out of this labyrinth, Tony mentally marked the location of the little girl's skeleton and gently laid the decaying blanket back over her. Even knowing this, it still didn't keep him from wondering, as he had with the evidence of the gunfight above, just what had happened here.

Tucking the candle stub into his pocket, he stood and looked around the room once more. _Where there's one forgotten body, there are usually more._ Cut off from his team, from normal life, and even from sunlight and fresh air, Tony simply wasn't capable of turning off that part of him that had him in his job to begin with, and so he started poking through the mounds of cloth dotting the floor. He located five more bodies of what had probably been children, though only one other held anything like the doll – in the second case, it was a hand-carved wooden truck. The rest of the mounds contained just mold and mildew and slime, though there were three along the far wall that had thick chains entangled in the cloth, one end bolted to the wall.

As Tony picked through the last of the miniscule hills of what had once been clothing and blankets, he found more chain and mold, but just as he was about to walk away, he found more bones. Half a forearm, the bones jaggedly broken with the hand still clutched into a fist held together by dried ligaments, still wore the manacle tying the former bearer of the arm to the wall. "What the _hell_?"

His imagination ran off without his permission. It took what he'd discovered above – the booze, the probable drugs, the empty armory – and painted a very grisly picture. _Human trafficking is far from a new idea. Maybe they kept the potential troublemakers chained. One might have escaped somehow. Explains the empty set of chain between those first two piles along the wall. Okay, so the guy escapes, maybe manages to subdue one of the guards and grab his gun. Explains the bullet-holes. But… If they fought back, why were the kids left behind?_

A faint breeze, almost too little to be felt, ghosted across Tony's face and interrupted his thoughts. "Where'd that come from?" he whispered, not willing to shatter the silence of this forgotten tomb with anything louder. He straightened and held the lantern high over his head, holding as still as possible. _There._ A little less than six feet away, the cobwebs draping the corner of the room shifted minutely.

He stepped over and reached out. The cobweb sheet tore away easily, revealing the disintegrating, mold-covered remains of what had once been a rough wooden door. All that remained was a vaguely J-shape of broken planks hanging crookedly from its hinges. Stepping over the knee-high remains of the latch side of what remained, Tony found himself in a tight tunnel of rough-hewn stone. A trickle of water oozed down the center of the floor and pale sheets of faintly-bluish moss coated patches of the walls. Distantly, Tony could hear a rushing noise, but didn't know if it was wind or water.

A faint giggle sounded behind him. Tony whirled around and saw nothing out of place. He scrubbed his good hand across the back of his neck – his injured hand had finally found a bearable position curled around the handle of the lantern. "You're losing it, DiNozzo." Putting the imaginary laughter out of his mind, he started down the cavelike tunnel, his footsteps echoing and reverberating oddly once the door was several yards behind him.

* * *

**A/N2:** Hee. I'm actually having a lot of fun writing this. I hope y'all are enjoying reading it.

Please remember to review. Thanks in advance.


	4. Chapter 4

**Disclaimer:** This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by the writers, producers, et al of the television show 'NCIS'. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person, internet persona, or other being, living or dead, is completely coincidental and unintentional unless otherwise noted.

**A/N:** Okay, so I'm a dumbass: I'm a smoker (please, no lectures, and no, that's not why I'm a dumbass, though you might not agree with that statement). I accidentally lit the filter on my smoke and it burned too far to simply trim it (I despise smoking filterless cigs). So, since it was my last one (until I get some more cash), what was I to do, throw it away? No! Duct tape really _can_ fix anything; I taped a filter off a butt onto the existing cigarette. SUCCESS!

Anyway, here's the next chapter for your reading pleasure – I hope you enjoy it. And I feel I should point out that Tony's view of spelunking and my own are in no way similar (I quite like caving, but even _I'm_ not crazy enough to ever want to do underwater caves).

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**Falling Up**

_Chapter Four_

The roughly excavated hallway meandered in a winding track with no branches, forks, or adjacent halls for nearly an hour before it opened into a fork. Tony took the candle stub he'd taken and used it to draw a mark at the opening to the right-side fork before moving down the branch. Every footstep bounced and echoed, playing tricks on Tony's ears, making it seem as though he were following someone or being followed, or both. Every time the twisting confines of the narrow slit of rock had the sound bouncing, he had to pause, though he quit calling out after the third time. The rushing sound – which Tony had decided was likely water – remained constant, neither growing nor decreasing in volume.

Unease had wrapped Tony in a cold shroud ever since finding that first skeleton, and as he searched for an exit, the same thoughts kept repeating and repeating in his mind: _Why were the children left behind? What exactly happened in that bootleg distribution hub? Why were there no lanterns anywhere but the 'barracks'? Why, when whoever had been running it had cleared out, had so much been left behind?_ He was no closer to the answers than he had been back in that damp, cobweb-strewn hole.

His thoughts were interrupted by a noisy _beep_ from his phone. Pulling it from his pocket, Tony leaned against a mossy patch of wall. The battery indicator was flashing. His shoulders slumped in defeat. He powered it off to preserve what little juice it had left, then replaced it in his jacket. "So much for calling the team when I get out of here." He sighed and checked the time on his wristwatch.

It was closing in on four in the afternoon. They had arrived at the derelict warehouse at almost precisely noon and the bust had gone down less than ten minutes later. "Four hours," Tony mumbled. "How come it feels more like four _days_?" His nailess finger throbbed in counterpoint to the goose egg on his temple while a dry scratchiness was beginning to coat his tongue and throat. "Shoulda stayed upstairs. But I was so _sure_ there was a way out…" He rubbed the point where his hair ended on the back of his neck. "Probably _is_ a way out, but not one I'd see. If there were two hidden doors, I'd bet real money that there's more I simply didn't find."

He raised the lantern and looked back the way he'd come, then faced the opposite direction. "This reminds me a little of the first bit of the maze in _Labyrinth_." The memory of the eyeball-moss in the film flashed through his mind and he pushed off the wall. The patch he had been leaning on was a pale blue color, a little smushed, but noticeably lacking in eyeball protrusions.

"Come on, DiNozzo – get a grip on yourself. It's just a tunnel. Nothing down here but a few spiders and some rats. And your overactive imagination." A tiny voice piped up from the back of his mind, _But you heard someone – some_thing_ – laughing. You know you did._ "There's no such things as ghosts," he replied, but had anyone else been there, they would have heard the uncertainty in his tone.

Squaring his shoulders, he pressed onwards.

_Quit chasing questions, DiNozzo. What's the evidence tell me? Okay, they were keeping people in there. The presence of children indicate it was not a case of them being competitors or rivals. No, the fact that they had their own jail confirms that. If it were a rival, they'd go in the cells I found. I'm going to run with the idea that they were dealing in human trafficking. Illegal immigration or slave labor or whatever, I don't know the motives, and probably will never know that part, not unless I can find someone still around who was there back then. Anyway, so… They kept their living cargo in the most inaccessible part of their warehouse. That set of empty chains either means it was always empty or that someone managed to get loose. The bullet marks I saw tend to indicate the latter. Okay, so guy busts loose, knocks out a guard, takes his weapon. Fits with the evidence so far. But why, if they managed to get out, did those kids get left behind? And what happened to the rest of the guy whose arm is still chained to the wall?_

While Tony chased his own thoughts inside his head, the rushing noise of distant water faded away until the only sounds remaining were his own pulse, breath, and footsteps. Tony didn't notice this, not until the tunnel he was following suddenly made a hairpin turn to the right and opened into a vast cavern.

Tony stopped and stared. Even in the flickering yellow glow of his lantern, the cave was beautiful, draped in flowing, frozen stone ranging from white through several shades of yellow to grey. His lantern couldn't reveal the far side of the cave, though looking directly up, he managed to catch sight of the ceiling – roughly sixty feet above him. _Floor of the tunnel must have angled down, rather than up._ Drips of water splashing on both rock and into inky, still pools pinged around the chamber.

Disturbed by the sudden openness after hours of close confines, Tony involuntarily took a step back into the tunnel. "Okay, I got two options. Option one: I head back the way I came." His voice echoed back to him just as he was about to continue. It was like hearing his clone speaking while standing next to him. He suppressed a shiver and continued silently, _Or option two: I press onwards and pray there's a way out of here._

Exploring caves was not something he was equipped to do. _And it's not something I ever really wanted to do, either. Always thought the people who did so were plain crazy, and those idiots who explore underwater caves are stupidly suicidal._ "Guess it's time to head back and see where that other branch goes."

As Tony retraced his steps back towards the fork in the tunnel, the light from his lantern faded from view of the limestone cave. On the opposite side of the cave, a tongue flickered out and picked molecules of sweat and kerosene out of the air. Its owner's mind swam up out of hibernation at the prospect of food.

Still puzzling over what possibly had happened back in the distribution hub, Tony's ears didn't pick up on the nearly inaudible whisper of scales scraping over rock.

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**A/N2:** I got side-tracked yesterday, so this chapter was a little later than I'd intended. Sorry about that.

Please remember to review. Thanks in advance.


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